Music and Cosmopolitanism: Rio de Janeiro at the Turn of the 20th Century

Music and Cosmopolitanism is a musical portrait of a city-Rio de Janeiro. Award-winning author Cristina Magaldi takes readers on an auditory tour through the city’s early post-Imperial years, a period of crucial transition, as she surveys the city’s variegated ’soundscape.’ With visits to opera theaters and dance halls, and from symphony concerts to the cabaret, music halls, and the street, Magaldi moves through a gamut of musical expressions in Rio de Janeiro during these critical years of change. Her investigations demonstrate that the city’s musical practices were articulated within a cosmopolitan context shared by residents in cities in the Americas and Europe, as she examines the musical and cultural interactions that resulted from early processes of urbanization, globalization, and the circulation of technology and information into and out of the Brazilian capital. While Rio de Janeiro’s particular geography, urban spaces, and specific social and ethnic interactions all played roles in characterizing unique local musical practices, Music and Cosmopolitanism focuses on how these practices were linked to and fueled by the circulation of music on the international stage.

To understand music and performance as part of a larger system of human connections and disconnections that are always in motion, this book offers a story of musical Rio de Janeiro that was built as much as, or perhaps more so, from the outside in than from within its socio-historical and cultural contexts - a city that grew to become one place containing many worlds.

Cristina Magaldi is Professor Emerita at Towson University and holds degrees from the University of Brasília, the University of Reading, England, and the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research focuses on music during the 19th and 20th centuries, Latin American cultures, globalization, and cosmopolitanism. She is the author of Music in Imperial Rio de Janeiro: European Culture in a Tropical Milieu (2004) and her publications have appeared in Popular Music, Latin American Music Review, Musical Quarterly, among others.